Tuesday, July 24, 2012

CAIR-LA'Summer Night for Civil Rights' a SuccessSome 500 people turned out on Saturday for an evening of comedy, hip-hop and spoken word at "A Summer Night for Civil Rights," hosted by [CAIR-LA] to celebrate civil liberties achievements and to inspire and uplift the Southern California Muslim community.

Report: Language Matters When Talking About Islam, Muslims[T]he American public discourse with respect to Islam and Muslims has taken an increasingly negative turn. At the same time, however, the seeds of the corrosive public discourse that eventually produced the paranoid hysteria about Islam on the right were already being sown via a systematic campaign based on lies, misinformation, half-truths, and gross caricatures of medieval Islamic teachings, many of which do not reflect modern Muslim beliefs or practices.

The American Mosque: Behind the Controversy Many myths have emerged regarding mosques in the United States, including that they are sources of radicalization among American Muslims, that they are led by extremist clergy, and that they host practices that border on the occult. None of this could be further from the truth.

Audio: Gen. Boykin Claims Dearborn Governed by ShariaThis prompted one of the co-hosts to ask Lieutenant General Boykin about Dearborn, Michigan which he claimed was "almost one hundred percent Muslim and operating under Sharia law now." Lieutenant General Boykin agreed: "If you walk down the streets, you would think you were in Beirut or Damascus."

Fox News Contributor: 'The Real Problem is the Quran'Fox News contributor Steven Crowder continued Fox News' pattern of inciting intolerance against Islam, accusing a "high percentage" of Muslims of "hat[ing] Christians and Jews" and saying that "the real problem is the Quran."

FBI Trainingon Arabs, Muslims Promotes StereotypesGet ready for FBI training in dealing with Arab and Muslim populations. Take note that "Western cultural values" include "rational, straight line thinking" and a tendency to "identify problems and solve them through logical decision-making process" -- while "Arab cultural values" are "emotional based" and "facts are colored by emotion and subjectivity."

Latino, Former Altar BoyNow Houston Imam (Chronicle)With family roots in El Salvador, Parada is part of a growing number of Hispanic converts to Islam in Houston and the United States.